The Family : Part 8

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 9 of 25)

It is an effort to return to mediæval thought and practice and to reaffirm in legal outline the headship of the husband and father, the permanent minority of the wife and mother, and the complete subordination of the children. It is even an effort to rescind such laws as have given married women independent contract-power and property rights, the equal guardianship of their children, the full use of educational provisions, and individual relationship to the state through the franchise. Voices are not wanting to insist that only through a return to this old domestic order of kingship of the man can the family be preserved.

A recent book claiming intellectual authority and endorsed by many men in high positions states this opinion clearly, and seeks to strengthen it by the use of scientific half-truths used not scientifically but as a support for a metaphysical theory of masculine and feminine quality. Every step that has been taken from the male despotism within marriage and parenthood has met such appeals to stay the progress of democracy toward the hearth-stone lest the family order be wholly destroyed. Most people, however, believe that the steps which have been taken away from that family despotism are too many to be retraced. Women will not be put back into perpetual legal minority when once they have become adults under the law. They will not consent to lose property rights and the power of guardianship over their own children. They will not consent to their own disfranchisement or to the loss of opportunities of education and of economic independence. It is as futile as it is stupid to expect that in this matter history will go backward. To oppose measures already accomplished which are in the direction of democratic adjustment of social relations, even by those who think certain measures "a reform against nature," is not only idle in effect but shows that the opposer is out of touch with "whatsoever forces draw the ages on."

There are many elements in the restlessness of a period too rapidly changing to be always sure of its ground that needlessly confuse the issues of family obligation and personal loyalty to accepted tasks. There are many tendencies toward extreme individualism which need balancing by clearer ideals of social serviceableness. Especially is this true in the case of women somewhat intoxicated by the belated freedom and power which came to them after too prolonged a struggle against inherited bonds. There are many economic and educational requirements yet to be met in order to protect and maintain the accepted ideal of monogamic marriage. But of all the ideas inimical to the family in our modern life, the demand for its return to aristocratic and outgrown forms is the most absurd and the most harmful. All history shows that those who try to put a law, a political system, an economic method, a rule of morality, or a religious ideal back into a form discarded by the majority of those who constitute the ethical and intellectual élite directly work toward the chaos of revolution. To try to force the family ideal or its legal bond or social outline back into the patriarchal form is to do the utmost possible to bring on a catastrophic struggle between the new and the old. The evil wrought by such reactionary teaching is in the exact ratio of its power of influence. Whatever we may try to do, as balance, through evolutionary methods at points where changes in form have not been as yet made safe and sane by required adjustments of the individual life to the new order, we should make haste to attempt. No person, however, who is in actual touch with the movement of social progress can hope to turn any great democratic tendency back upon itself and "make that which hath been as if it were not." No truly just person will wish to do so.

The Prevalence of Divorce. - Many urge reactionary attitudes toward present family ideals and practice because of the divorce problem. The omission of this from the list of causes for the modern instability of the family and for its too frequent lack of success may have been already noted and condemned by the reader of these pages. The fact of divorces, however, whether they be many or few, is to the writer a symptom, not a cause, the legal expression of a social disease, not the disease itself. Bad diagnosis, or inadequate treatment on the basis of a symptom, may increase the disease; and the facts concerning divorce are of so serious a nature that a separate chapter has been assigned to them under the heading: The Broken Family. The prevalence of divorce, however, it must here be said, demonstrably proves two things - one that men and women now feel themselves at moral and social liberty to seek divorce when longer living together seems to them intolerable, and that women are using their new freedom and economic independence to make marriage conditions more to their liking. They are setting a standard respecting desirable husbands, not always wisely, often selfishly, but in the long run and large way to ends of greater equality of demand in the marriage relation. The tendency on the whole is toward a higher conception of what marriage should be and what it should do for both parties in the bond. The statistics of illegitimacy, of commercialized prostitution, of venereal disease, of infant mortality, of early death or life-long invalidism of wives and mothers, of marital unhappiness and parental neglect which are found by honest investigation in states and nations in which no divorce is allowed do not lead to the belief that legal permanence of the marriage bond secures socially helpful family life. On the contrary, such facts already show that divorce in the civilization we have inherited comes as a result of bad conditions which worked infinite harm before divorces could be obtained.

Old Institutions Need New Sanctions. - We must now ask of any laws concerning any institution not what did ancient "folk-ways" ordain but what do modern conditions require? No form of human association, however old and whatever its contribution to the social inheritance, but is on trial to-day before all free minds. That trial must be openly conducted. No "secret diplomacy" to reinstate old ideals or laws against the common belief; no "boring from within" to propagate new schemes the object of which is to gratify personal wish without regard to public good; but "open covenants" with the future "openly arrived at" in an ethically consecrated present. What shall be our guide in such a free and frank consideration of the present and the future of the family?

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.